


Waiting Out the Storm

by FunkyMeihem



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Cute, F/M, Fluff, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2016-07-28
Packaged: 2018-07-27 06:43:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7607788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FunkyMeihem/pseuds/FunkyMeihem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Gibraltar is hit by a ferocious hurricane, Mei is left behind to monitor things all alone...well, all alone except for Junkrat. Baffled by his overwhelming fear of storms, Mei decides to offer what support she can...even if it means she ends up hiding in a dormroom closet with him all night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waiting Out the Storm

Mei was awakened in the middle of the night by the sudden onslaught of high-pitched beeping from the massive table of computers and equipment on the other side of her room, her monitors flicking online and flooding the room with bright blue light. With a moan, she untangled her arms from the stuffed Pachimari she had been using as her pillow, groping blindly on her nightstand for her glasses. The sheets had tangled around her overheated body at some point in the night, and she flailed and kicked her way out of them as she staggered from her bed, sliding to sit down with a heavy thud on her desk chair. Wiping at her eyes, she glanced at the screen and promptly did a double-take, spine straightening alertly as both English and Hanzi characters scrolled across her monitors, a map flickering open before her. The observer buoys outside of the Strait of Gibraltar were seemingly going haywire, pressure systems dropping rapidly as a too-familiar spiral began twisting in the cloud formations out at sea.

She scrambled for her commlink, already starting to pull off her snowflake-printed nightshirt to get dressed as she kept an eye on the weather screens. “Winston? Winston! _Nǐ zài ma_? It is Mei, you must answer!”

There was long silence followed by static and an audible groaning yawn before a deep rumble answered her over the comm. “Mei? What is it? Is something wrong?”

“Take a look at this!” Her voice had a hint of both excitement and alarm, mumbling in her native Mandarin as she opened up Winston’s unique portrait in her contact list, sliding snapshots of her screen over to him. “I’m still working on trajectory calculations but I haven’t seen numbers like this in…in years.”

There was another long pause on the other line before he answered. “Mei, even at 3 in the morning, I can tell that this is bad news. But give me the short version, what is this and what do we do?”

“That storm I told you was forming outside the strait is heading into the strait. And it is getting far stronger than I thought. Far, far stronger. I would have to go through our weather history fully to make comparisons but…Ah, qǐng wèn, I am getting ahead of myself! It’s going to make landfall right over us and it will be intense. _Wa! Zhè zhēn tài liǎobùqǐle!_ I haven’t seen a storm this strong since-”

“What do we do, Mei?” Winston repeated patiently.

“We need to cast more observer buoys into the southwest to cover where the others get swept away…Also we need to batten down all doors and windows, bring anything outside, inside. The southside will take the brunt, I think. And that mission that you have coming up, you will need to launch early. As early as you can manage.”

“All right, I’ll alert the others and call an emergency meeting. Though I don’t think anyone’s going to like waking up to this news…”

“You need to do it right away, Winston. Once that storm hits us, nobody is going to be able to get in or out.”

 

* * *

 

Mei stood awkwardly on the sidelines as she watched the others scramble about. It seemed Winston really had called the entire team. Rays of red-tinted morning light were barely starting to peek over the clouds as the rest of the Overwatch team worked, carrying crates of supplies, ammo, and armor into the enormous transport waiting on the pad. She scuffed a boot as their gorilla taskmaster ambled over in full armor, barely pausing as he took a heavy box from a struggling 76 and tucked it effortlessly under one thick arm.

“Winston…Are you sure I would not be of any assistance? I just feel…I mean, everyone else is helping.”

He shook his massive shaggy head with a grunt. “We have two teams deploying early, Mei, everything is just a bit chaotic. It’s not that we don’t want your help in the field, but I would be more comfortable having our best climatologist overseeing things here. You said it yourself, once this storm hits, anyone here is stuck until it ends. We’ll wait until you can give us the all-clear to return.”

She sighed and glanced down, trying to keep the disappointment from her tone. “So it will just be me here to monitor the storm?”

“Ah…Well, you and Mr. Fawkes…”

Mei guffawed aloud. “Junkrat? That is supposed to make me feel better, having to watch those two as well?”

“Two? Mei, unless Mr. Fawkes has undergone mitosis and split into two unique beings…And pardon me for saying so, but I shudder at the thought of more than one of them…it will just be you and Mr. Fawkes himself.”

That caused her to go quiet. The thought of Junkrat without his ever-present bodyguard had not even occurred to her. She had never once seen Junkrat and Roadhog without the other nearby. They had arrived together, had insisted on sharing a room together (she remembered Winston had quietly ordered special furniture to be made for them after Roadhog had broken their last two sets of bunkbeds), ate their meals together, went on their shared assignments together, and as far as she knew, probably used the bathroom together. The two Australian junkers were thick as thieves, which they were, and Mei had done her best to avoid both. Avoiding Roadhog had been easy enough. He had never shown much interest in her or anyone else, barely speaking to anyone but his partner and never removing the eerie leather pig mask he always wore. But to her consternation, Junkrat had ‘taken a mighty strong shine to her’, as McCree had put it, and pestered her incessantly whenever he spotted her.

“So I’m…I’ll just be here with that no-good bully? With him mooning over me while I try to do my job? How?”

“Mr. Fawkes is currently confined to the med bay after suffering from a concussive rib wound when-”

“When he scared himself with his own shadow and threw a grenade at the floor!”

“When he suffered an _accident_ during his last mission, which was completed successfully.” Winston finished diplomatically. “Mei. Please. Just take care of this for me. I am…asking nicely?”

She tightened her jaw and huffed a bit harder than she meant, but then sighed and nodded, lowering her head in defeat. She knew Winston was being run ragged from trying to oversee Overwatch’s new upsurge in activity, and she felt a tinge of guilt at causing yet more problems to her old friend. “Sorry, sorry, sorry…I know you are doing your best, we all are. _Wǒ dāyìng_ , I will keep an eye on operations here and alert you when it’s safe to return. Everything will be fine.”

“Thanks. I mean it. I know you’ll do your best. Besides, Angela assured me she has the boy so stuffed full of tranquilizers that he should sleep for a week.”

She managed a half-smile at him in reply. “That should make things easier on everybody, then. I will let you get back to it. Good luck.”

“You too, Mei.”

 

* * *

 

The transport had launched with its teams aboard, fleeing the onslaught of massive black clouds that moved ominously above the churning seas. Mei, true to her word, had taken charge of remaining operations at Gibraltar. All outside storage had either been battened down or secured inside, storm doors and windows had been tested twice, power had been rerouted to the main building only and all weather surveillance systems were running at max. She had only torn herself away from the main screens several hours later, padding softly towards the last open door to the outside. She had never been as much of a storm-chaser as some of her old cohorts, but couldn’t deny her fascination as she watched inky black darkness encompass the sky, punctuated by far-away bolts of lightning and the distant roar of thunder. The soft patter of rain steadily increased to a steady drone, staining the pavement dark gray as she stood at the door, sipping her hot chocolate. It was better to enjoy it while she could. If her calculations were correct, the worst of the storm was yet to come.

The rain was soon coming down in sheets and starting to flood the open doorway, and with a sigh, she hit the final lockdown button as the door hissed down behind her, sealing her away and deafening the sound outside to a barely audible hiss. She meandered back to the main room with a sigh, plopping down into a chair and flicking open one of her puzzle books. There was a very real chance that communications and internet could go down, and she had learned to be very good at entertaining herself.

For the next several hours she remained alone in the comm room and drained two more mugs of hot chocolate, flicking through weather charts and watching the maps update, occasionally getting up to look through the skylight window as the downpour continued and the rain whistled and sliced through the wind horizontally, the monstrous storm howling outside as it clawed to try and find its way in. Thunder boomed near-constantly, the reverberations rolling through her, and the dark sky lit up with flashes of white and purple. She had been right to advise Winston to move out when she did. Being anywhere outside in this storm would have been suicide. She just wished he hadn’t taken everyone else with him…

Well, not everyone else…

 

* * *

 

 

She was jolted from her reverie as a loud crashing bang erupted from the nearby hallway, and this time it wasn’t the echo of thunder. Setting down her mug and her pencil, she hurried towards the sound, only to find the door to the medical bay hanging open. She reached in to flick on the light, voice lifting nervously.

“Junkrat? Um…Mr. Fawkes? Is that you? _Nǐ shēntǐ hǎo ma_? Is everything all right?”

A familiar figure was leaning heavily on the side of the bed, both massive and scrawny at the same time, a hospital gown already hanging halfway off his narrow hips and-

“Oh! OH! Junkrat! _Pants_! You’re not wearing pants! Put that back on!” Mei’s voice went shrill, holding up one arm to shield her eyes as both cheeks burned pink.

“Oh there ain’t time for pants, mate,” the junker replied, voice slurred and movements sluggish from clear sedation. His peg-leg was somehow already attached to his missing limb, but his mechanical arm was draped over the nearby chair as he fumbled to tie the strings of his gown around his waist with his good hand. His wild shock of blonde hair, normally singed and gray with smoke, had somewhat grown back in his bald spots, sticking out at odd angles. And with Mercy having cleaned him up as best she could, Mei could actually see a smattering of freckles across his cheeks.

“It ain’t polite to stare, Snowflake! Roadhog…where’s he?”

“You are not supposed to be awake! Dr. Ziegler said you were supposed to be resting for the rest of-”

“Where’s Roadie!? We gotta go, we gotta-”

There was another loud boom from the storm, and Junkrat shrank back as if he’d just been struck, narrow chin lifting as he stared up at the ceiling wide-eyed. Mei paused. For the first time that she’d ever seen, at least, Junkrat looked…scared? Not that she’d ever spent that much time with the strange young man, but she had seen him in battle. Even surrounded by enemies, flames and smoke, with bullets buzzing past him, he had always laughed like a mad thing. She’d never seen him like this. His eyes burned a strange amber, glinting gold at their centers, pupils dilated noticeably even from a distance. His gaunt chest was rising and falling rapidly in near-hyperventilation, and when the echo of the reverberation rumbled through the foundations, he made a little strangled noise in his crooked throat, scrambling to pull his arm on. “There’s red coming in under the door. They always say they’ve reinforced it enough, but it’s never enough. It’s going to get in and it’s going to burn us, mate, we gotta go…”

“I don’t think…”

“It’s going to seep in, the red! Comes in through every crack!”

She looked about unsurely, trying to think how to diffuse the downright odd situation. She tried a little laugh and shrug, still watching him rummage through the medical bay in search of his pants. “Junkrat…it’s just thunder. You’re not scared of a little storm, right?”

“I never said I was scared,” he spat, “Now for the last time, where’s Hog? How long I been out?”

“Roadhog is out with the others on a mission. I’m just here to monitor the storm system and you are supposed to be resting. Everything is fine, why don’t you just get back in bed and I’ll give Dr. Ziegler a call?”

“Out? He can’t be out, I didn’t hire him to just go out! He’s supposed to be here!”

“Well he’s on a mission now, those are the orders. It’s just you and me.”

She hadn’t expected Junkrat to look so genuinely distressed again, as his teeth grit audibly and he finally snapped his mechanical arm into proper place, using both to reinforce the ties that were just barely holding the apron of his hospital gown around his gaunt hips. He looked ready to snap something back at her, but another sizzling crash of lightning and thunder interrupted him and he performed an odd little hop before turning tail and outright fleeing from the medical bay, leaving Mei aghast as she watched his bare ass disappear down the hallway.

 

She returned to the comm room, fumbling with the controls before pulling up her list of contacts. Her first instinct was to call Angela, but she was listed as unavailable and Mei knew better than to interrupt her while she was busy as Mercy out in the field…and Mei wasn’t sure that even with Mercy’s advice, that she would be able to tranquilize a very large and very frightened, possibly deranged Australian man. She also didn’t want to bother Winston about the matter, not after she’d already made enough trouble about staying behind already…So, that left only source of possible answers. With a polite, nervous little clear of her throat, she hit the contact button just below the portrait of that eerie, sightless black pig mask.

There was a brief waiting tone, and then the link flickered online, followed by the rough, almost asthmatic rumble of its recipient. “Roadhog here. Make it quick.”

“Erm… _nĭ hăo_ , Roadhog. I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m having some problems dealing with your friend.”

There was the rattle of gunfire and Roadhog wheezed painfully into his commlink as she heard him laboring to quickly move position before answering her. “…He’s supposed to be asleep.”

“I have tried telling him that! I’m surprised he can still even move around, but he actually ran away from me. Kept saying that there was red coming in?”

“Storming still?”

“ _Shì_ , very badly.”

“He’s scared of storms. Always has been. All junkers are. For good reason.”

“Well, what do I do?”

“Make him feel better, if you want. Make sure he doesn’t blow anything open or try to get out…” There was another hail of gunfire noises. “They’re on three sides. I’m going to go now.”

“Wait, what do I do!”

“Roadhog, out.”

She vaguely heard the voice of McCree whooping in the background before the link abruptly ended. Roadhog had surprisingly little compassion or advice for dealing with his junker partner, though she puzzled over his words, as brief as they’d been.

 

_All junkers were scared of storms, for good reason...  
_

 

* * *

 

The rain and wind still battered the base from all sides, and the dorm areas were dark and otherwise quiet from the manual shut-down, dimly lit only by the emergency lights on either side of the main hallway. Mei shuffled along them awkwardly, heading towards the heavy metal door of the room that held their Australian guests. It was cracked open just slightly, and she heard a muffled noise from within, leading her to pause and knock politely. For a moment she fretted outside, chewing on her lip, waiting either for sullen silence or for him to turn her away.

“…Yeah, come in I guess,” came the answer.

She swung the door open the rest of the way, and was greeted by the flickering light of several candles. Makeshift curtains had been hastily draped over the window, doing nothing to muffle the sound of the rain as it beat against the reinforced glass. The enormous custom-made bunk bed took up most of the room, with the top mattress looking more like some wild animal had made a nest of it, piles of blankets and several sleeping bags mounded atop it…which stood in an extremely strange and stark comparison to the much larger bottom bed, which was immaculately made and scattered with several large somewhat raggedy Pachimari stuffed toys. She took a step towards the pile atop the bunk, but another sound clinked from across the room and she walked over to linger by the closet door.

“So I…don’t think you’re supposed to have candles in the dorms. Open fire sources.”

Junkrat’s voice sounded from within, low and unhappy. “You came here just to tell me that?”

“No. I mean, the candles, they look nice. And it is pretty dark with the power off and…Junkrat, can we talk?”

“You’re talkin’ ain’t ya?”

“I’m sorry I made that joke earlier, about you being scared of thunder. I wasn’t thinking, I didn’t mean to be rude and I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings or anything, honest. It didn’t occur to me that you’re used to a different kind of storm. The kind that you should be scared of. I didn’t mean to be a jerk about it. I’m sorry.”

The closet door’s handle creaked as it opened, and Mei leaned to peek into it, a pair of glinting golden eyes peering at her suspiciously. He shrugged his bony shoulders, covered by a tattered green blanket where he sat huddled in his makeshift fort full of dirty clothes and extra boots. “ _Tchauh_!” he scoffed, though a bit more shrill than usual. “I lived through plenty of storms!”

Mei leaned back against the wall, eying the flame of a nearby candle. “I know, but I was reading up on my team’s old records from the Australian outback after the…disaster. Even our bravest members never ventured too far there, we’d always send the bots. I read about some of the storms there and they sound amazing. Amazingly terrifying, I mean, but amazing. They make storms like this one seem like…” She trailed off, trying to think of the correct words in English.

“Like chump change, is what,” Junkrat supplied for her, opening his closet door a little more. He muttered something to himself, sucking on his gold upper tooth before scooting a little to one side, spreading his blanket. “You uh…you want to come in?”

She paused. But when another peal of thunder sounded outside the window and the junker’s gaze turned genuinely pleading, she relented, edging through the closet door as she sat down next to him in what little space he allowed her. It smelled like old boots, musty cloth, mothballs, and a little like Junkrat, especially when he draped the rest of his blanket over her shoulders and leaned back, staring at the ceiling as he rocked lightly on his elbows, clearly still nervous. For a long while neither of them spoke, just listening to the incessant noises of rain pelting the outer windows.

“So, what did ya read about us?” he finally asked.

“Well it wasn’t about…you. I mean, about junkers. My team were climatologists, we were mostly just studying the weather systems after the crisis. And from what I read, we didn’t do a very good job of it. We lost hundreds of bots, fried millions worth of equipment from the radiation, and the weather patterns couldn’t even be called patterns. I saw a few pictures, but there wasn’t much to see. Red, mostly. Just sand and wind and red, like you said.” She wrapped her arms around her knees, still watching him carefully. Just talking to him seemed to be calming him down, even if she was trapped in a smelly closet to do so.

“They seemed worse when I was just a li’l rat. You’d haul ass towards the nearest junker town and bribe them with anything and everything you got, and hope that they wouldn’t just take it and cast you out on your arse when the storm actually hit.” His gaze looked far away, worrying at his lower lip. “Ya never had much time, never was any warning except when folks saw it headed towards ya. You boarded up, you welded scrap around the doors, piled up rags, you did anything what you needed to do to keep it out, and it would still get in.”

“The storm? The radiation?”

“Ah, I’m just talkin’. You know me, I’m a talker!”

“No, I want to know.”

“Well…Don’t remember my mum much but I remember us hidin’ in someone’s house who was kind enough to take us in. There was a couple folks already there, and I remember handin’ them nails and screws and covering the cracks with our extra clothes. And then there were…other people, two of ‘em, outside the door, arrived too late. Some folks wanted to try and take everything down, get them inside, but other folks stopped them, kept things shored up because it was too late. I remember there was still a little crack between the boards so I peeked out. And I watched the wind started blowing and then everything turned red and the sky was just howlin’ like a mad thing. And the rain started, but it wasn’t rain, it’s never just rain. Nope, Snowflake, it’s the acid rain, all full of poison from what those fuckin’ omnics put in the air. And I looked out and saw nothin’ but red and…those two people.” His voice wavered as he looked up at another grumble of thunder and went silent, until Mei gently placed a hand on his arm. “They were out there in the red, Mei, and they were trying to hold up this shitty piece of scrap metal but it didn’t last long. They were screamin’, banging on the walls and screamin’, and the people inside were crying. I think my mum was crying. And after a while the screamin’ got softer and then it stopped. And then the red started seepin’ in wherever it could, and we used up every last scrap of supply we had to try and stop it. Took a day and a half to pass over us, and when we were able to leave, my mum told me not to look, but I looked.” He swallowed thickly, and Mei looped her arm around his a little more. “Saw what happened to people who got caught in storms, I did. Was real fucked up. I won’t tell ya what it did, Snowflake, you’re too good, you don’t need to know that.” He trailed off, lifting his bad arm as his metal fingers scraped through his scraggly blonde locks. “Saw a lot of that, over the years.”

She wasn’t sure how to respond so she simply kept her arm around his, not pulling away even when his hand brushed hers, fingers tangling together beneath the ragged blanket as he flinched during another particularly harsh session of thunder.

“ _Nǐ hěn yǒnggǎn_ …I have seen many storms but…that sounds awful. I am sorry, Junkrat.”

“Aw, Snowflake. You don't gotta use that name. Real name's Jamison Alexander Fawkes the Thirrrrrd... Or Jami, if I like ya.” He managed one of his crooked, smarmy smiles, and Mei was almost glad to see it.

“Jami, then.”

She pulled the rough fiber blanket tighter around her shoulders, suddenly aware of just how much heat the junker’s body gave off. The man was like a furnace, even when he was relatively calm, and she noticed it more than ever as he started to lean more and more into her, fingers still tight around her much smaller hand. And even though she seemed to have gotten her strange closet companion through the worst of it, she somehow felt an urge to keep talking.

“Jami…you know I’m not really all that scared of storms?”

He snorted near her ear. “Oh, you makin’ fun of me again now?”

“No, I mean…I’m not scared of storms because I can hear the rain and wind and thunder and sometimes it can get a little intimidating but…I’m not scared of that. I’m scared of it being too quiet. I didn’t want to stay behind without the others, not because of the storm but…that little time between the storm and when they’d be able to return, when it would be too quiet.”

He looked at her curiously, singed brows lifting at the audible hitch in her voice. He pulled her closer in against his side, giving her a little shake as she lowered her head. “Hey…Mei, darl, don’t you go gettin’ upset too. Hey, we’re all right, you n’ me. We’re all right.”

She shook her head, the little snowflake pin rattling on its chain in her bun. “Jami, it was so quiet when I woke up. It was so quiet. And I was cold, all over, and there was nothing…Just me trying to breathe again, it hurt to blink because there was ice on my eyelashes, I remember that. And I kept listening for the others, but…quiet. I started calling for them, and when I could walk I went to the nearest cryostasis pod near mine. Her name was Dao, she was from Thailand and specialized in precipitation, but when I looked at her…She was gray all over and her eyelids had shrunk and her lips were pulled up and I could see all her teeth and…” She shuddered, wiping at her damp cheeks with a forearm. “All of them were like that. I checked on every single one of them, I was yelling for help and there was nobody there to help me. And I know that Overwatch had protocols I was supposed to follow…find some emergency beacon and radio out for SOS and find a safe place and all that. But I just sat down next to my stasis chamber and I cried.”

Junkrat had finally stopped shivering, listening intently as he pulled her close, unconsciously rocking her lightly from side to side. “S’alright. I woulda cried too. I mean…I mean, maybe. You ah…you told anyone about it?”

She shook her head miserably, sniffling and quickly wiping at her eyes. “They…know. And I told Angela about some of it. But when it’s too quiet and there’s nobody around, I keep thinking that I might wake up back there…again. So I don’t mind the storm. I’m more scared when it’ll end. Wa, I don’t know why I told you all that, I didn’t mean-”

A pair of burning hot lips almost seared her skin as they were pressed to her cheek. Mei’s spine stiffened and she spun to look at him, wide-eyed.

“Well don’t you fret your pretty head, darl, because you know me, I’m terrible at bein’ quiet. How about we make you a deal?”

“W-what kind of deal?”

“A secret closet deal. Well you and me…we kind of know each other now a bit, yeah? Hey, relax, we ain’t going to pick out curtains or anything. But maybe…I mean, Roadie knows me all right but he just shoves me in a closet and throws some blankets on my head and calls it a night even if there’s a storm. But you, I mean you’re the hoity toit weather bigshot around here…maybe when it storms real bad you wouldn’t mind coming over so you can talk t’me? And if you ever think it’s getting too quiet, I will drop literally everything I’m holdin’ and come running so I can talk t’you?” he offered with a hopeful grin.

“I think that I would like that.”

She thought for a moment, before climbing over his gangly legs and promptly sitting between them, her back to him. The junker looked positively startled, then his grin returned with a far more sheepish air as she grasped both his arms and draped them around her shoulders, enshrouding them both inside the blanket. He took his chance, leaning over her to press another quick kiss to her other cheek, and smirked when he saw the deepening shades of pink she was slowly turning.

“What? Ya can’t be blushing like that over one lil’ smooch.”

“Erm…Jami…I just realized you still don’t have your pants on.”

“Oh, roight, sorry.”

 

* * *

 

Junkrat had eventually fallen back asleep, after stuffing a pair of sweaters between Mei and his flimsy medical apron. They had talked for a while, and whenever the wind howled too loud or the thunder hit too close, she would launch into stories about her time at various climatology stations, and he would answer with one of his tales of his chaotic adventures. But the tranquilizers still in his system eventually took their toll, and his head slowly dipped to the side, resting on a stack of dirty clothes piled in the side of the closet. Mei had followed not long after him, listening to the rain as she tucked herself in against him, closed the blanket around them, and drifted off as well.

She awoke several hours later with a crick in her neck and her body positively overheated, throwing off the blanket as she carefully unraveled Junkrat’s arms from around her, leaning forward to peek out of the closet. The candles had burned down and gone out, and the storm had abated to little more than a steady rain. Checking the time on her commlink, she grumbled and spun about to gently push at his bare chest as much as she dared.

“Jami…Jami, _xǐng lái_ , it’s morning.”

“Nnh…I’ll have a brown one, please…”

“Jami!” She rolled her eyes, before placing a hand to the side of his face and leaning to peck a quick briefest-of-kisses to his half-open lips.

The groggy junker’s eyelids fluttered open, pupils narrowing and dilating on each golden iris as his closet-mate came into focus. A goofy grin spread across his face as he finally came to. “Well, g’day Mei, I say. Now that’s one of the best ways I been waken up in a long time.”

“The storm should mostly be over by now. I guess I’d better head back to the comm room and let everyone know. And you need to get back to the medbay or Angela will have my head.”

“Yeah, yeah, I got to take a sickie and then another few days of lyin’ around to look forward to, great. Erm…So maybe you, wouldn’t mind coming to visit me? I mean, since you and I-”

“Jami…”

“Hey, I’m not talking about us rooting under the doona or anything.”

“Jami!”

“But you know…if it gets too quiet.”

She tapped his narrow collarbone, half-smiling at his hopeful expression. “I’ll think about it. Now come on, we need to get back.”

 

* * *

 

 

She sat in the comm room chair, restoring power, unlocking doors, and turning off emergency protocols before sending out an alert to Winston and his team.

“Winston, this is Mei. Gibraltar is fine, damage is minimal, I’m officially granting the all-clear for any returns when you are ready to move out. Light rains in the southeast, clear skies ahead.”

She glanced up to see Junkrat still lurking in his medical gown in the hallway, watching her. She lifted a hand to him, and he winked cheekily before waving back and flashing a thumbs up, turning to limp back towards the med ward.

“We’ve…we’ve weathered the storm, Winston. And I think everything is going to be all right.”

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
